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Our top 5 wacky NASA missions that might just happen

MEET the space technologies of tomorrow – or maybe a decade beyond. Since 2011, NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts programme has chosen long-shot exploration ideas that appear worth pursuing. This year’s crop, announced last week, features 13 proposals, each scooping a $100,000 grant covering nine months of further research. Some of the more striking, even bizarre, ones include:

• The Brane Craft. Where normal spacecraft are just way too bulky, this solar-powered flat square, 1 metre to a side, could be an agile substitute. It could wrap itself around debris in low Earth orbit to drag it out of the way.

“A robot probe could travel to an asteroid and convert the ice and rock into spacecraft parts“

• Blasting asteroids with a laser beam. This would vaporise icy material on the surface and heat up rock underneath. The glow from the heated rock would shine through the vapour plume, letting a probe analyse and identify chemicals in the debris.

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• The Direct Fusion Drive. Assuming it works as advertised, this fusion-powered rocket engine could cut the travel time to Pluto in half. Once there, it need not sail by like the New Horizons probe did last year – it could settle into an orbit and even land.

• A clockwork Venus rover. No lander has survived on Venus’s hostile surface for much more than 2 hours. The solution might be a fully mechanical one, with no electronics. To send messages back home, it could record data on a phonograph, then loft it on a balloon to rendezvous with a spacecraft overhead.

• A mechanical spacecraft carved out of an asteroid. A robotic probe could travel to an asteroid and convert ice and rock into analogues of spacecraft parts, including a propulsion system that would control the asteroid’s direction by jettisoning material into space.

Full details of all the funded projects are scheduled to be released in August.